


Outside

by deathwailart



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Families of Choice, Gen, Hunting, Wild Open Spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 13:26:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>30 days of writing challenge: outside</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outside

Even beneath the spacious roof of Jorrvaskr she can feel claustrophobic and crowded, as if the walls of the great mead hall are closing in around her, foolish when her childhood homes were even smaller and more sparse. Then again, she rarely spent time within those dwellings. Her father woke her before dawn, both of them breaking their fasts with the sunrise in preparation for a long day of hunting; she’s sure her feet had marched from one end of Skyrim to the other and back again before she was ten. Small wonder that the beast blood feels so right to her.

“Your mother was a wild one,” her father liked to say when they skinned their prizes to sell at market or to improve their weapons and armour, “she hunted me down and pounced. Your mother’s blood has ever been restless.”

It’s an idea she likes. That this is all meant to be, stalking the plains and mountains, bow in hand. None can best her with a bow, she can hit impossible targets with a well placed strike as the world slows to a crawl until the moment she looses an arrow. Her first kill happened young so she can’t remember it well but she is sure there was pride radiating from her and her father, not a demonstrative man, no not him, a strong stoic Nord, weatherbeaten face and calloused hands. He bestowed the huntress epithet when he took her to Jorrvaskr to see her mother. Aela had worn leather and hide armour made from the very animals she had killed, boots lined with thick fur - they’d killed ice wolves past Windhelm and she had known the taste of horker meat, so rich and fatty it had seemed decadent.

There are days when she misses how her life once was, camping with the howls of wolves around her, the hooting of owls as the wind whipped around them. When she was smaller they shared a tent, her father telling tales of her mother’s glories that her mother was too busy to tell herself and old folk stories to the patter of rain on a hide roof.

It’s what she thinks of now when she passes camps venturing with the Companions on a hunting trip or some job they are paid for, wondering who keeps the camp, what they’re doing, if there are others like her and her father out there. Only two others who yet live know of it, Skjor and Kodlak. Kodlak knew when she joined the Companions, apparently from her mother who had some sentimentality in her, well-hidden but then again Kodlak was a father to them all and to Vilkas and Farkas in particular, the twins having run around the halls as children. Aela liked to torment them when they were all small, before Farkas got big and could beat her at wrestling (that was when she resorted to horror stories of plunging her dagger into spiders as big as her.) Skjor learned once she joined the Circle, going with her when the beast blood first claimed her senses, tearing through the plains, howling like some fell beast called from Oblivion to rip apart the good and the wicked alike.

Skjor she will always miss. The one who understood, who ran with her sparking all the stories the guards muttered under their breath, sneaking out through the Underforge to hunt as they were meant to, skin and tendon ripping under her teeth, the hot rush of blood coating teeth and tongue, matting fur. With Skjor gone, with Kodlak gone, with the twins cured and her alone, she races at night through the open plains, charges for miles howling loud enough to send everything with the sense to run into some hiding place. It is preparation for her reunion with Skjor (perhaps her mother too, she doesn’t know if she took the beast blood, didn’t ever know how to ask without sounding like a whimpering whelp) in Hircine’s hunting grounds. But there’s no rush, there is glory and honour to be won and Skyrim has ample opportunity to hunt all there is to hunt yet.


End file.
